1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a comment recording apparatus that records comments delivered at meetings, visually displaying such comments, and plays back such comments in response to a user request.
2. Description of the Background Art
In meeting information recording/playback apparatuses, a comment structure at the meeting is visually displayed, and such comments can be used as an index to access recorded meeting information. In such known meeting information recording/playback apparatuses, voice and/or visual image recorded at a meeting receives a speaker identifying process to segment recorded voice and/or video information by speaker (i.e., segmentation of information by each speaker), and prepares segmentation results that are visually tied to each speaker or user. As a result, voice and/or video information can be played back by designating a particular segment that includes certain voice and/or video information.
For example, JP-2004-023661-A discloses a system that records image and/or voice of in-progress meeting and uses a key sentence extraction technology for natural language processing, speaker identification process in voice processing, and voice global/regular expression/print (grep) technology to automatically extract comment-related video and/or voice for each speaker for each topic such as agenda. Such system may generate segment information for a same speaker and a same topic from video and/or voice recorded at a meeting using key words and comments of each speaker extracted from minutes of the meeting to enhance re-use of recorded information.
However, such meeting information recording and playback apparatus of JP-2004-023661-A uses an algorithm that refers to other comment-delivering participants who have delivered comments before and after the relevant comment-delivering participant. In such a condition, it becomes difficult to search a particular topic and/or content in more detail because a user needs to remember the context in which one or more relevant comments were delivered. Further, because the minutes of meeting are used, such system cannot be used for an in-progress meeting because minutes of meeting is not yet been prepared.